I’m not sure what there is to debate, unless you mean there needs to be very strict scrutiny to make sure these reports are reliable. The data should be there - end of debate. What data there is tends to be alarming.
This does seem to be an alarming statistic, but do we have enough information to know whether race is the determining factor for this disparity, or whether there is another, more causative variable that happens to somewhat correlate with race?
For example, what if young black men are X times more likely to be carrying a handgun when in a confrontation with police than young white men? It may be that police are more likely to shoot a young man with a handgun in a confrontation than a young man without a gun, regardless of skin colour. What if the behaviour of those confronted by cops happens to differ between the groups? For example, suppose cops are less likely to shoot a submissive subject than a resisting subject. Is the ratio of submissive subjects to resisting subjects consistent between the races?
I am going to hazard a guess that police are more likely to shoot a man in a confrontation than a woman, out of proportion with violent crime statistics. If this is the case, do you think it would be due to sexism by the police?
AA and as are the same thing. What you think of when you encounter the phrase AA is simply a demonstration of ignorance, not fact. (I do not accuse you of willful ignorance, but it seems odd that after 52 years of AA you only have one understanding of it.)
The AA I described is the form that JFK’s Executive Order initiated. It is the form that Gerstenberg directed General Motors to follow. While quotas were ordered by a few courts in the early 1970s, (in response to lawsuits brought against fire and police departments where it was noted that simply filling openings on a prortional basis would, due to low rates of attrition, leave those agencies seegragated for decades to come), Bakke[ had already begun the reversal of quotas except in education before 1980. In employment, the process I described IS AA aside from a few places with screwed up HR departments.
Of course, your second sentence simply contradicts your first. The whole “perceived propensity” is based on race. The red herring that the police are factoring in things like clothing falls apart when one recognizes that the clothing worn by black you is, in the vast majority of cases, identical to the clothing worn by white and Asian youth.
And it is foolish for the police to presume that they need to be more violent in their responses based on badly imagined perceived threats. It is similar to the ethnic profiling that some people advocate for screening terrorists on planes. They argue that it is valid to screen “Arab” looking people because that is where most terrorists originate, carefully ignoring the young Irish woman and the attempted shoe bomber, neither of whom look “Arab.”. A careful policeman should be watchful of everyone he stops, not just those against whom he has a race driven fear.
One of my big concerns with the data is that it’s voluntary reporting but in statistics like in the OP it applies the sample statistics to the overall nationwide demographic. Voluntary reporting is not a random sample. I’m not particularly concerned that departments are under reporting homicides during voluntary reporting. At the local level it would be too easy to call them out. It’s easier to just not report than falsify.
Developing controls for the non-random sample’s demographics wouldn’t even take mandatory reporting. Implementing jurisdiction into the data of those reporting , if it’s not already, would be much easier than implementing mandatory reporting. (Along with getting the law passed I can already see the lawsuits by states asserting that’s an overstep of federal powers.)
How many of us here even know right now if we’re in a jurisdiction that reports? We all seem to want better data/research. The local/county level is where most of the data is at. Pushing reporting by political means at a local level would seem to be important no matter ones take on “21x more likely.”
This is the most eye-opening (and chilling) thread I’ve seen in a long time. I’m stunned by the lengths to which some people will go in denying what are obviously troubling statistics.
“The thing is, people aren’t being treated differently because of their race, but because of their perceived propensity for violence. The skin colour is irrelevant.” Seriously, what does that even mean?
A few points:
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There was some discussion earlier of black stereotypes and whether they were common. I don’t claim this as proof positive, but if you type “Why are black people …” into Google it offers to finish your question with things like “so rude” and “so lazy.” Ask “why do black people …” and you get “loot” and “riot” and, of course, “like fried chicken.”
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All the talk of police wariness seems beside the point. They can be as wary as they want, but when they interact with people they are supposed to follow procedures and use violence only under specific circumstances. Seeing a black man reach for his driver’s license, as ordered, isn’t one of those circumstances. All this nonsense about police wariness basically amounts to saying that if police get scared, then it’s no big deal if they squeeze off a few rounds just to be on the safe side.
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I would like more clarity on the odds of any given person a cop encounters turning out to be violent. I suspect it’s tiny, whether the person is black or white. I know that when doctors talk about Group X being, say, 5 times more likely to develop some rare disease than Group Y, it still means any individual person has only a tiny chance of getting the disease. If 1 white person in 1,000 gets violent with a cop, then maybe the number for blacks is 6 in 1,000 – thus, there’s no justification for treating the other 9,994 black people like criminals.
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Cops are supposed to control situations and do their best to de-escalate confrontations. I have a huge problem with the fact that their encounters with black people produce a dead body 21 times more often than their encounters with white people. In theory, I suppose it’s possible blacks are 21 times more likely to force cops into a situation where violence is unavoidable; in practice, I doubt that very much.
It’s not “blacks”, in the far more specific group of “young black men”. A group that, based on the statistics in this thread, that no-one has disputed, commit vastly more violent crime than any other group.
Why do you doubt that this particular group is more likely to force such a situation? Is it just because it seems wrong? If so, I can understand that to an extent, but the statistics seem to suggest it’s not particularly unreasonable. Or, do you have an issue with the statistics?
Here is a list of police in the United States killed in 2014, compiled from the Officer Down Memorial Page, listing the officer, the assailant, and the ethnicity of the assailant. (I looked up the news story for each death to discover the participants and the events.)
There were 34 murders, (I excluded accidents or deaths due to negligence).
Of the 34, 21 (62%) were committed by whites and 9 (26%) were committed by blacks. While that reinforces the notion that blacks are “more violent,” the number of police murders committed by blacks is nowhere near 21 times greater than those committed by whites.
Beyond that, none of the murders by blacks (and only two by whites) was the result of a policeman unwarily treating a suspect with too much deference or too little regard for his own safety. None of them involved situations such as the shooting of Michael Brown in which a policeman on the street was suddenly attacked by a person he was questioning.* Most of the murders, regardless of the ethnicity of the perpetrator, were either ambushes or firefights that erupted when an actual crime was interrupted in progress. There appears to be no support in real life terms for the notion that a policeman in direct conversation with a suspect has more to fear from anyone of any particular ethnicity. In only two cases did a person stopped by the police suddenly begin shooting–and in this year, both of them were white men stopped for traffic violations.
Sergeant Cory Wride Jose Angel Garcia-Jauregui Hispanic
Deputy Sheriff Jonathan Scott Pine Benjamin Holtermann Asian
Detective John Hobbs William Thornton White
Officer Jason Crisp Troy Whisnant White
Deputy Sheriff Ricky Del Fiorentino Ricardo Chaney White
Police Officer Robert German Brandon Goode & Alexandria Hollinghurst White
Master-at-Arms Mark Mayo Jeffrey Savage Black
Officer Alexander Thalmann Bryan Stallings Black
Police Officer David W. Smith James Clark White
Trooper Gabriel Rich Nathaniel Kangas Indian/Eskimo?
Sergeant Patrick Johnson Nathaniel Kangas Indian/Eskimo?
Police Officer II Roberto C. Sanchez Mynor Enrique Varela Hispanic
Detective Charles Dinwiddie Marvin Guy (during no-knock search) Black
Patrolman Stephen Arkell Michael Nolan White
Police Officer Jair Cabrera Elijah Arthur Black? Hispanic?
Trooper Christopher Skinner Almond Upton White
Police Officer Brian Jones James Brown White
Police Officer Kevin Dorian Jordan Michael Bowman White
Police Officer Alyn Beck Jerad Miller White
Police Officer Igor Soldo Amanda Miller White
Chief of Police Lee Dixon David Risner White
Deputy Sheriff Allen Bares, Jr. Quintylan Richard & Baylon Taylor Black
Officer Perry W. Renn Major Davis Jr. Black
Patrolman Jeffrey Brady Westerfield Carl Blount Black
Detective Melvin Santiago Lawrence Campbell Black
Police Officer Scott Patrick Brian G. Fitch Sr. White
Chief of Police Michael Pimentel Joshua Manuel Lopez White? Hispanic?
Police Officer Daryl Pierson Thomas Johnson III Black
Patrolman II Nickolaus E. Schultz Michael Hrnciar White
Corporal Jason E. Harwood Ross Lane White
Deputy Sheriff Joseph Matuskovic Michael Oswald White
Corporal Bryon Keith Dickson, II Eric Frein White
Deputy Sheriff Michael Norris Christopher Calmer White
Sergeant Michael Naylor Dan Higgins White
- I have no idea whether the Michael Brown shooting, specifically, was justified or not and without a film of the event or a “confession” by Darren Wilson (or the ghost of Michael Brown), I doubt that we will ever know what really happened or how it could have been handled differently. I am sticking to the topic of this thread addressing the apparent excessive number of police shootings.
The statistics do not support a disparity of 21 times. Your math was bunk and no one has even tried to explain it. Young black males are 6 to 9 times more likely to be involved in violent crime than young white males; that doesn’t come close to matching that disparity.
White people are twice as likely to own guns compared to black people, and older people are much more likely than younger people to own guns. That doesn’t fully answer your question, which is more specific in a couple of ways. But the fact that the disparity runs the other way suggests the answer is no.
I think that’s plausible. But are police more likely to shoot a black person with a gun than a white person? Compare a Cliven Bundy to a John Crawford, for example. (I’m not saying two examples proves this point.)
There are a couple of problems with this proposal: one, does ‘resisting’ justify shooting? I would say it doesn’t unless the officer’s life is in danger. Two, would police descriptions of ‘resisting’ be consistent across races? I don’t know that they would.
Again, if you want to debate a different subject than the one being covered in the thread, maybe you should start another thread.
I’m not stunned at all. Read enough of these threads and you come to expect it.
This is not specifically related to police shootings, but it does demonstrate numerically how police in Ferguson, MO treat black people differently than white people… two links – an Op-Ed from the NYT, with data cited from here, that says the following:
There’s more, from the data – Ferguson, MO is about 63% black, 33% white. But for over 5000 traffic stops by the Ferguson MO police department, only 13% of those stopped by the police were white, with nearly all the rest black. So the Ferguson PD disproportionately stopped and searched black drivers, and found signficantly less contraband than on the white drivers they stopped and searched.
It seems to me that the Ferguson PD is more likely to pull you over, and more likely to search you, if you’re black, even though black people are statistically less likely to have contraband. That doesn’t seem right to me.
And it was the same with stop and frisk in New York. Of course it’s hardly a surprise that if you start searching people almost at random based on race, you’re less likely to find anything. That’s one of many reasons you shouldn’t do it. Stop and frisk was a giant waste. And the thing to remember is that that name was unique to New York, but NYC was not the only place that used those sorts of tactics.
And I think that does support a bunch of different points that have been made in this thread: the police are systematically far more suspicious of black people than whites, that there’s not much reason they should be more suspicious of black, and that those suspicions are rarely borne out by facts. It shows that you can’t pin the problem on t shirts and gold chains because there’s no way they were only stopping black men who were dressed a certain way. Or for that matter if you did pretend all of these people were dressed a suspicious way, this shows that people dressed that way usually aren’t doing anything wrong. What this really demonstrates is that these kinds of stops and searches are utterly ineffective. So police shouldn’t profile based on race. Singling people out for that kind of scrutiny violates their rights, and if for some reason you don’t care about that, as some people weirdly don’t, then you can see it doesn’t work.
You’re using statistics on a young black man’s likelihood of being involved in a violent crime and drawing conclusions about behavior when encountering police. That’s not a completely unwarranted leap, but it is nonetheless a leap.
Knowing how quickly things can go bad during a police stop, why wouldn’t black people be particularly cautious not to avoid action that would inflame the situation? Even if the minority of black criminals aren’t that smart, surely the vast majority of law-abiding black people are extra careful when pulled over by police.
If you don’t agree with my reasoning, that’s fine, but surely you’d have to admit that we’d have to know a lot more about what triggers police shootings before we can generalize about them.
One more thing. I notice in the Pro Publica article cited in the OP that there were 151 cases of a person being killed by police while fleeing or resisting arrest --which does not sound particularly threatening toward the officers – and 67 percent of those dead bodies were black. I repeat: when police killed someone fleeing or resisting, two-thirds of the time the victim was black. Very disturbing.
Yes, I fully agree. As yet, no-one’s provided statistics on whether a disproportionate amount of law-abiding black people are injured or killed by the police.
Shooting someone who’s fleeing is almost always wrong*, but someone resisting arrest is almost by definition a threat to the officer.
*The only time it wouldn’t be is if, by fleeing, they are putting a third party in serious danger.
We know that a far greater amount of young black males (21 times) are killed by police than commit violent crimes (6 to 9 times), as compared to young white males. The ratios are very different.
That says nothing at all about whether the black people killed are law-abiding or not. Please provide a cite for the amount of black people killed by the police whilst not engaged in crime or resisting the police, and a similar one for white people. Otherwise, you have no idea how many law-abiding black people are being shot by the police.
My guess, based just on the RO threads on this board, is very few. The only one that people have come up with recently is the guy shot whilst reaching into his car.
ETA And that’s ignoring your (at best) cherry-picking the statistics, and at worst completely misrepresenting them.
We know they kill a far greater ratio of young black males to young white males, even taking crime stats into account. We know some PDs (like Ferguson, MO), disproportionately stop and search black motorists, even though black motorists are less likely to have contraband. That’s a pretty good indication that the police are treating black people differently, and negatively, without justification based on statistics.
We should learn more. But most police forces are not cooperating, and are actively making such learning difficult. That’s, in itself, a good indication that something may be wrong with what they’re doing.
The pressure and criticism should therefore be on police forces. And it’s good for them in the long run – better accountability and reporting will help them improve, and it will help rebuild community trust.
I don’t think many people disagree with this part - it’s one of the reasons I support police body cameras, for example, as I’ve said in another thread on this issue.
However, the rebuilding of trust has to happen on both sides, and needs to involve more respect for the law in whatever communities are ignoring it - whether that’s rich white bankers or violent young men. Being mistreated does not excuse misbehaviour.
To be perfectly frank, I don’t care much if someone who’s been observed committing a crime and then resists the police gets killed. I care equally little no matter what their age, race, or gender - the only think that would make me care even slightly more would be if they were mentally ill. What I do care about is the mistreatment of innocents - hence my strong support for self defence among other things. This is why I keep asking for the, as yet unprovided, stats on whether innocent black people are more at risk of being killed by the police.
The police absolutely need to be prevented from disproportionately investigating, let alone mistreating or killing, innocent black people.
Okay.
There aren’t any communities that don’t respect the law. There are individuals that don’t, but every community, for the most part (other than a small number if individuals), treats police officers with respect.
The statistics show that, for whatever reason, cops are either more likely to kill non-criminal young black males, or less likely to kill criminal young white males, considering the difference in the disparities. Either is unacceptable to me.
Innocent black people in at least some jurisdictions are far more at risk of being stopped and searched by the police, even with a lower chance of carrying contraband. That’s a good indication that the police are treating black people differently. If they’re being treated differently in that way, and considering the disparity in the police killing statistics that we have, I think we have more than enough information to at least demand that police forces try to explain the disparity themselves.